Jennifer Lyell died yesterday.

Three years ago, she told me she didn’t think she would live.

She had survived alleged sexual abuse at the hands of her seminary professor. For a time, she survived being viciously attacked, over and over again, by those who sought to make her out as the villain, the temptress, the whore. But she told me she didn’t think she could survive what was being done to her much longer.

Yesterday, her body gave out. The stated cause was a series of massive strokes. She was 47.

Her death follows that of SBC survivor Duane Rollins last month. Rollins was the alleged victim of SBC leader and conservative takeover architect Paul Pressler. The SBC is meeting this week in Dallas, Texas, at its annual convention. These deaths ought to cast a pall over the gathering, but if history serves as a guide, it will be business as usual—which means overlooking sexual abuse and refusing to implement protections while stripping women of any religious authority they may have somehow managed to get away with.

Jennifer placed herself in the line of fire because she wanted to protect other women. At the time she came forward, she was one of the most powerful women in the SBC. Converted at a Billy Graham crusade, she’d wanted to become a missionary but instead became an executive at Lifeway. She was a gifted teacher, and taught the Bible to women and children. She had a hand in around a dozen New York Times bestsellers. But she lost her job after speaking out publicly. And then, she lost her life.

RNS recounts that when she first reported that David Sills had “used force and his spiritual influence to coerce her into nonconsensual sexual acts,” Sills admitted to misconduct and resigned. Following a consistent pattern within the SBC, the details were not made public and he got another job in Christian ministry. It was then that Jennifer went public. She wanted to protect other women. But when she told her story to Baptist Press, a news outlet for the SBC, they changed her story from one of abuse to one of her engaging in “a morally inappropriate relationship.” This was just the beginning of what would become a vicious smear campaign to malign her character and defend alleged abusers. Baptist Press eventually retracted the story and apologized, but long after the narrative was established.

Even after the Baptist Press retracted the story, right-wing journalists piled on in a massive smear campaign.

It was in the midst of this smear campaign that Jennifer reached out to me. She had deleted her social media as a way of coping with, as she put it, “this current round of Jennifer the lying whore.” She was “seriously broken” and fighting back panic, but she was “still sane and strategic enough” to be cognizant of what was being done to her. she was also aware of, as she put it, her “inability to take more.” She wanted my perspective. She wanted to know if I thought people believed the lies being spewed about her, lies coming primarily from a “journalist” with a massive platform.

She told me she could rest in the knowledge of “knowing two things without a doubt: I have not lied at any time in any place about anything related to my case and I have honored any/all legal agreements of which I’ve been party…” But she needed to know: How powerful were the lies being told about her? Did people believe them? “Please do me the solid of not pulling a punch of truth,” she added. In other words, she wanted an outside perspective on how damaging to her reputation these lies were, especially the lies spewed by this purported journalist.

She wrote me at 1am. I happened to be unable to sleep that night, and I responded to her at 3am.

I told her that she had been caught up in a propaganda machine. I told her that sadly, there was a group who would believe whatever was said about her no matter what. “It’s not about truth, it’s about power. And re-inventing the narrative is power.”

But I also told her that a number of men were defending her publicly, including some not known for speaking out on issues like this. (To those men, thank you. Your voices did not go unnoticed.) Having closely tracked her story, I also told her that I found her words trustworthy, and that I had reasons for that: “My sense of your honesty comes from seeing your consistency, attention to detail, and determination, over and over again, to set the record straight…Yes, I’m prone to be sympathetic to you for a variety of reasons, but because of my work I’m also careful, and don’t jump on stories that are iffy or not well vetted.” I assured her that I found her words true, and that I understood what was being said about her was false.

And then I told her this:

“They are trying to destroy you. You mean nothing to them, but you get in the way of their narrative. If I can offer you anything, it’s that this is not about you. Your story, everything that happened to you, it has now been subsumed in something much bigger. But no less evil—a word I use sparingly but deliberately. There are bigger things unfolding on a national and even global stage right now and your story got swept up in that. It comes for people who stick their necks out. We might not win this, to be honest. I think of myself as testifying to truth, whatever the outcome. You’ve done the same.

But remember: outside of what you are to them—something to be crushed for strategy and sport—there is a bigger world. The number of people who have followed your story and watched this latest attack unfold outside of SBC circles is very small. It probably feels like the whole world to you, because it’s your world. But you can step out of that world. It’s not my world. I move in and out as an observer. But when I’m outside that world, it’s obvious how small that world really is. Most people have no clue what goes on there, nor do they care. Keep in mind you can choose to leave, locking the door behind you. Others will fight for you, and can do so because of the strength of your words and witness, but in all likelihood your attackers will quickly move on to new targets.

But you can just walk away. Trust me, you can. You’ve been at the heart of an incredibly toxic system, but there are other worlds to explore.”

I wish she could have walked away from that world, forever. I wish it had not destroyed her. But she knew that it would.

Jennifer and I had been corresponding to arrange a time for an interview, not about abuse, but about her work in Christian publishing—research I was doing for my book Live Laugh Love. She closed her email to me with suggestions for times to chat, and then this note, which I interpreted at the time as joking but also not joking:

“Maybe hold print as long as possible because at this rate they're going to truly do me in…and if so, your publisher could definitely work some marketing around that. I'm all for selling books forever!”

At the end of my film For Our Daughters, I included a picture of Jennifer as a tribute to her courage, her sacrifice, and her love.

Because Jennifer did what she did for love. She did it to protect other women. She also did it to protect the church that she loved.

That love placed her in directly in the line of fire.

In his report on her death, Bob Smietana closes with the detail that she had a pair of stepping stones in her front lawn with a quote from C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: “When a willing victim, who has committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead…the Table would crack and death itself would start working backwards.

Jennifer, I’m so desperately sorry. May you now know the peace denied you in life, denied you by people who did evil in the name of the Jesus you loved.

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